Background: The ice cream manufacturing industry is highly susceptible to fluctuating costs in value-added ingredient addition, as well as product quality affected by the percentage of these ingredients in the mix.

Ingredients added to the semi-frozen ice cream base mix are typically called "inclusions". Inclusions can be comprised of anything from marshmallows to chocolate chips to coconut flakes.

By closely monitoring the percentage of these high value inclusions in the mix, food manufacturers are assured of cost control and savings, as well as continued product quality.

Application

In this case a customer was looking to replace existing fruit feeder technology in order to achieve a higher degree of accuracy in the feeding of high quality, costly ice cream ingredientswithout damage to the individual ingredients. In addition, the design must meet the stringest cleanliness standards of the dairy industry, with minimal downtime for disassembly and cleaning operations. Operation is continuous duty, up to 24 hours per day.

Inclusions are manually dumped into a large hopper from boxes, bags or small drums. The feeder discharges the inclusions directly into an ice cream mix pump line. As materials are discharged gravimetrically from the feeder, they are distributed into the ice cream mix flow and pumped continuously downstream to the packaging line.